Malware infections may be detected through the use of signatures, which antivirus applications may use to match against portions of suspected malware running on electronic devices. The signatures may make use of hash methods to expedite the detection of malware. However, some malware may be polymorphic, contain variable data or instructions, or otherwise function such that a hash operation upon different instances of the same malware may yield different results. Thus, individual kinds of malware may require many different signatures to adequately detect all variations of the malware, wherein the signatures may use comparisons of byte sequences.
Malware may include, but is not limited to, spyware, rootkits, password stealers, spam, sources of phishing attacks, sources of denial-of-service-attacks, viruses, loggers, Trojans, adware, or any other digital content that produces unwanted activity.